As to the ethics of my conduct in the vicinity of the barracks, it was not immoral. The ordinary woman has only one lord, to whom she is bound “until death do part.” My lot was to have practically at one time a hundred, who were not forcibly and permanently linked up with me. There were not the reasons for monandry and for permanency that exist in the former case. As to race-suicide, my associates were legally bound not to rear families. From the standpoint of their health, relations with me were safer than with the ordinary purveyors. Furthermore, they told me that no exhaustion supervened the next day, as in my own case. I was not bent primarily on coition, but on social intercourse tinged with flirtation. I never solicited. It was not necessary, as every one knew me.
Over two years now went by of an existence rendered very delectable by reason of association with young Mars one evening a week, all the rest of my time, as usual, being devoted to scholarly pursuits. I was then called upon to say good-by—as I feared, forever—to my much coveted position of pet of a fort, which I was in large measure. Spermatorrhea, from which I had suffered acutely since the age of sixteen, had come to a crisis. For the past two years, while looking to be in good health, I had suffered intensely from mental and physical prostration, due almost entirely to ejaculations during sleep but in small part to nervous shock following fellatio.
Driven to a Stripling.
Neurasthenia now confined me for six months to the village home of my parents. The “procreative” instinct gave me no rest, just as a drug fiend has none when denied his anodyne. Night after night I roamed the streets in the factory section. On two occasions I was successful. On a third I was crazed by enforced abstinence for over a month. I encountered a youth just under puberty. I clandestinely ascertained that he did not know me, did not attend the same church, and was employed in a part of the village where he was not likely to run across me. I was a shoemaker, just arrived in the village looking for work. I was lonely and languishing for company. A burden was oppressing me and I needed a confidant. Would he be my confidant? Would he promise to keep strictly to himself what I was about to tell? Had he heard of hermaphrodites?[[5]] I was one.
[5]. As this term is commonly a part of the vocabulary of laboring men, I sometimes used it in reference to myself, as they would not have understood the proper term. I am of course not an hermaphrodite in the present signification of that term.
I found that to permit fellatio was decidedly against his tastes, and plead earnestly that he would show me compassion, at the same time offering money. His final answer was: “I was not brought up that way. I would never permit it. I am a Christian.”
Fearing he would raise an alarm, and I would be arrested and my family disgraced, I sprinted away. After a few seconds I looked back to see whether I was followed. My terror produced the hallucination of a mob. I sprinted around corner after corner and did not rest until some distance outside the village, where I found a hiding place and moaned and complained to my Creator over my lot.
Spermatorrhea.
I was now afraid to show myself in the village, and unutterably downcast at being the victim of an obsession which led me to commit what are commonly regarded as revolting crimes. From this consideration, and also because of the wrecking of my health through emissions during sleep, I decided on immediate castration. Minor motives were that I would prefer to possess one less mark of the male, and that I thought the facial hair cells would cease to function and I thus be rid of my most detested and most troublesome badge of masculinity.
From the age of seventeen to nineteen, on the day following an ejaculation during sleep, I would be feeble, very forgetful, and would stammer. From nineteen on, after I had begun to yield to instinct, the ill effects were much less marked until during my twenty-eighth year—the point of time at which this autobiography has arrived—when my eyes were dim for one or two days following, my hearing was somewhat disarranged, and my heart abnormal in its action. During this period of eleven years, various remedies prescribed by physicians were without effect. I happened to be a globe-trotter, and thereby discovered that travelling, particularly sea voyages, much diminished the ejaculations. It is necessary here to remind the reader that both solitary and mutual onanism were always entirely unknown to me, and that in my sexual life, my pudenda were practically non-existent.